Tabor Students Engage in Real-World Science and Ethics at MBL

A group of upper-level Tabor biology students had a rare opportunity earlier this spring. The group, supervised by Chair of the Science Department Tamar Cunha, traveled for a short stay at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The MBL is a private nonprofit that attracts leading researchers, faculty, and students to its campus to collaborate, explore, and advance its mission of “fundamental biological discovery.”

MBL has historically provided top-notch science education to undergraduate- and graduate-level students. More than a decade ago, it expanded its programming to include high school students—with help from Tabor’s Director of Marine Sciences Jay Cassista, who worked to form the initiative that became today’s program. “Tabor has been fortunate to have this opportunity,” Cassista says. “We’ve even seen a couple students from Tabor who have taken the course continue at MBL as interns.”

Students can engage in specific courses while on site. The Tabor group chose a course on the application of CRISPR gene-editing technology and fluorescent marking of zebrafish embryos. Students were able to examine embryos under a microscope to determine whether genes were inserted into an embryo’s genome successfully. 

The work has broader implications as scientists focus on how organisms repair and regenerate. Cunha notes, for example, that the hair cells that detect sound in the inner ear of humans are similar to the hair cells in the lateral line, the specialized sensory system cells that fish use to detect pressure; those cells are the reason, she says, an entire school of fish can change direction at once. “We know that the human cells don’t regenerate, but the fish cells do,” Cunha says. “Why do some organisms regenerate and some don’t? Is there anything we can learn about gene editing that would help us repair our hearing as we age?”

The course went beyond the lab, and also brought students into a discussion about the ethical considerations inherent in the CRISPR technology and the potential future of medicine. “Because of the work we’ve done in science and across the school, our students are comfortable talking about the choices people have made and the ethics of those choices,” Cunha says. “I really enjoyed listening to that seminar. They had read articles to prepare and made some really great contributions.” 

Not only do students get a chance to see the science they learn in the classroom apply to a broader, real-world set of applications, Cunha says, they also get a sense of “what it means to truly spend time in a lab.” She compares the experience of a science classroom laboratory experiment—which students engage in during 40- or 60-minute classroom periods—to the experience of science in the real world. “You may be sitting at a lab bench for three hours injecting cell after cell,” she says. “Students get the benefit of learning actual technique, but also the mindset and the habits that come with doing science.”

Students also get to see the infrastructure of a research institution: what different lab setups look like; what it takes to maintain stocks of the organisms that are studied; the throughlines of work that occur between laboratories. They also, Cunha says, got to meet and have one-on-one and group conversations with researchers at different stages in their careers, which “was really important for our students.”

“They’re attentive,” she says. “They’re taking notes, they’re asking questions, they’re connecting what they’ve learned in classes at Tabor to topics that are being discussed, and then they’re getting into a lab. They get to really dive into it and collect a lot of data that they can then sift through.”

Cunha calls the workshop “an amazing opportunity for our students to obviously do good science, but also understand what the Marine Biological Laboratory is. The opportunity to have a student’s horizons expanded in just three days is exponential.”